


Child Kings

by TwoCatsTailoring



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Turks - Freeform, after years, generational, looking back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 17:11:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwoCatsTailoring/pseuds/TwoCatsTailoring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rude looks back over the years of service to ShinRa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Child Kings

He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is lucky to still be able to move under his own power. To still, somehow, be useful to a ShinRa even if he isn’t being shot at or thinking two steps ahead (there was a time when it was five) of whoever the latest threat is.

He is much luckier than the first of the ShinRa’s that he protected. (Rude doesn’t like that word because he knows that now, he isn’t  _protecting_  much of anything. Not the way he once did.) They buried Rufus in ‘22, knowing full well then that the ultimate price of Geostigma was in the damage that it left behind, taxed organs sensitive to everything and even so young as 40 being too advanced of an age for them to hold out. 

Reno was gone now by just 6 months and that still stung. Tseng taken out by a bullet fifteen years ago. Elena’s body was still there, he visited her often, but she? The bright, golden haired girl with a hair-trigger temper? No, she’d been gone now, her mind slipping further and further away until she had no memory at all of the things she’d been a part of. She hadn’t recognized him for a year.

Even Rufus’s children were starting to feel the sting of age now. His daughter was a widow now, and how she had cried with her head on his lap when her husband, a Turk (it was a name that meant so many things, but the dying never changed) had died. A little daughter of her own (twelve years old wasn’t really little, was it?) seeming to understand it better than her mother did. 

And Rufus’s son as well. But that was different, and somehow more tragic. How they had struggled, he and his wife. Wanting children for so long and then, when it happened at last! Joy turned to sorrow when only one of the twins survived. But, survive the little girl did and went from creeping in to his office for playtime and sweets to slipping in for long talks about past mistakes and future plans for the company that he’d help rebuild with people who were all gone from his side now.

And now, here she was again, 35 years beyond Rufus dying (a man she was so _very_  like but had never known) peeking around his office door before pushing it open with her elbow. 

"I promised I would bring him by. Don’t ever say I don’t keep my word." And then, without much else in the way of introduction, there is a baby in his arms. So small and all blond hair and wide blue eyes (he thought these things were supposed to be recessive…?)and Rude just shakes his head.

"Tell your wife if she ever gets tired of looking at you pale people she can come talk to me. This is getting ridiculous." His fourth generation of ShinRa has a good grip though, tugging on his outstretched finger.


End file.
